half a bushel of apples is a lot

so. what's the easiest thing you can do with half a bushel of apples? applesauce.

apples cook down quite a lot. for this recipe, i used about 25 apples--a mix of macoun and macintosh--and ended up with somewhere between 6 and 8 cups. tart and slightly sweet.

the beauty of applesauce is you can pretty much do whatever you feel like. i will, however, recommend that if you are going to make applesauce regularly and you don't like chunky applesauce that you should invest in a food mill. homemade applesauce tastes about 82735834 times better if you leave the skins on when you are cooking them down. the skins really have a ton of apple flavor in them.

as you can see, i found this out the hard way. i peeled, cored, and diced the apples and put them in a big stockpot.

then i added about a half a cup of brown sugar, two tablespoons of cinnamon, 1 tablespoon of nutmeg, and a dash of ginger. the apples should contain enough water to allow the apples to cook down without burning, but if you're at all worried add in a dash of apple cider to accelerate the process.

then all you do is put the pot on low heat, stirring occasionally, until the apples are mushy. that can take anywhere between .5 to 1.5 hours. i like my applesauce chunky, but if you want it to be smooth, stick it in a blender a few cups at a time or in a food mill.